# Ray Tracing

> Ray Tracing refers to rendering graphics by simulating the physics of light and materials.

Source: https://metavert.io/ray-tracing  
Published: 2026-01-22  
Updated: 2026-03-10

Ray tracing is a rendering technique that simulates the physical behavior of light—how it bounces, refracts, reflects, and scatters off surfaces—to produce photorealistic images in real time.

Traditional real-time rendering in games relies on rasterization: a collection of computational shortcuts that approximate how light behaves. Ray tracing replaces these approximations with physics-based simulation, producing dramatically more realistic lighting, reflections, and shadows. The most advanced form, **path tracing**, traces every ray of light through a scene and has quietly become the biggest visual leap in gaming since the transition to 3D.

NVIDIA's RTX platform, built around dedicated ray-tracing hardware in their GPUs, has been the primary driver of adoption. As of 2026, over 800 games support ray tracing, and full path tracing—once considered too expensive for real-time applications—is becoming viable through AI-assisted upscaling technologies like DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling). These neural rendering techniques use [AI](https://metavert.io/artificial-intelligence) to reconstruct high-resolution frames from lower-resolution ray-traced images, making the performance trade-off increasingly favorable.

As [3D engines](https://metavert.io/3d-engine) and [GPUs](https://metavert.io/gpu-computing) continue to advance, ray tracing and path tracing will become the default rendering approach for [games](https://metavert.io/games), metaverse [experiences](https://metavert.io/experiences), and real-time 3D applications—collapsing the visual gap between pre-rendered film and interactive media.

## Related Topics

- [Spatial Computing](https://metavert.io/spatial-computing)
- [3D Engine](https://metavert.io/3d-engine)
- [GameTech](https://metavert.io/gametech)
- [GPU Computing](https://metavert.io/gpu-computing) [AI Inference Infrastructure](https://metavert.io/ai-inference-infrastructure)

## Further Reading

- [The Physics of Light and Rendering](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKHqY4qrzKE), talk by John Carmack
- [NVIDIA RTX Ray Tracing](https://developer.nvidia.com/rtx/ray-tracing)